[HN Gopher] Windows NT for Power Macintosh
___________________________________________________________________
Windows NT for Power Macintosh
Author : TazeTSchnitzel
Score : 252 points
Date : 2024-07-12 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fny wrote:
| Very, very cool, and I can't wait to relive giving up all my DOS
| games!
| TickleSteve wrote:
| This isnt an x86 emulator that can run a DOS box, this is NT
| running natively on PPC.
|
| So... no DOS games I'm afraid.
| nullindividual wrote:
| _Macintosh_ PowerPC.
|
| NT4 was already compatible with PowerPC systems. The support
| ended with NT4 Service Pack 2; no further SPs had PPC
| support.
| FMecha wrote:
| Because desktop PowerPC was unpopular for anything other
| than Mac, and PPC NT wasn't designed for Open Firmware.
| Though you can blame Microsoft's monopoly tactics - in
| which loyalty to x86 was the prime directive, alternative
| OSes on PPC Macs were not a widely accepted idea either -
| people stuck around with classic Mac OS, in (ultimately)
| vain hopes that Copland/Taligent would deliver.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Where are you getting this information?
|
| The PReP/CHRP was a venture by Apple, IBM, and Motorola
| (but primarily IBM) to allow companies to build OSes for
| a common platform. Apple didn't want to participate in
| the end. But like other ports of NT to MIPS and Alpha
| (Alpha enjoyed much more support until Compaq dropped
| support), the popularity was well beneath the dirt cheap
| in comparison x86 platform.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_Reference_Platform
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_P
| lat...
|
| This had nothing to do with Microsoft's monopoly. And
| nothing to do with exclusively 'desktop' PPC -- remember,
| NT4 Server also had PPC support through SP2. IBM's
| intention was for servers, not desktops (though they did
| produce compatible laptops/desktops), to support
| operating systems such as AIX and S[l]o[w|l]aris
|
| AIX isn't exactly a desktop OS.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > AIX isn't exactly a desktop OS.
|
| If so, only artificially; AIX was born on a workstation
| and seems to still support running a graphical desktop
| environment.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Just like NT4 Server :-)
|
| Intended use vs. potential use.
|
| And yeah, NT4 Server was just NT4 Workstation with some
| registry fiddly bits flipped.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Right; NT was and is likewise quite capable of being a
| desktop or server OS, the difference is that MS actually
| pushed that and NT 10.0 is still actively used in both
| contexts.
| lizknope wrote:
| AIX was the first Unix I ever used in 1991 on an IBM RT
| with the ROMP CPU
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC
|
| I wanted one on my desktop so bad. DOS/Win3.1 PCs were
| just so bad to me. Then I saw SunOS and really just
| wanted any Unix system on my desk. I bought a PC in 1994
| just to install Linux.
| icedchai wrote:
| I had one of these back in the early 90's, bought used,
| of course. It was running AIX 2.x. I moved on to Linux
| pretty quick.
| FMecha wrote:
| >Where are you getting this information?
|
| From personal perception every time I read articles on
| Taligent, Copland, and Workplace OS (which did result in
| a demo PowerPC port of OS/2).
|
| >This had nothing to do with Microsoft's monopoly.
|
| Admittedly I had that comment in mind to pre-empt any
| potential narrativeposting.
| duffyjp wrote:
| Someone gave me an NT4 CD when I was a kid and on the jewel
| case it said it supported x86, PPC, I think some other
| architectures too. I was disappointed I could never get our
| PowerMac to boot from it. :P
| nullindividual wrote:
| Alpha and MIPS are the other two architectures.
|
| _Sad trombone noises for Alpha_
| duffyjp wrote:
| I had a job in 2006 where the sysadmin ran the entire
| shop on a single OpenVMS server with two 500Mhz Alpha
| CPUs. It was our file server, AD server (somehow), DB
| server, web server, everything.
|
| I just looked it up and that CPU came out in 1996, at the
| same time Intel released their 200Mhz Pentium. Alpha was
| way ahead of their time.
| my123 wrote:
| NT on PPC had NTVDM afaik (with the licensed SoftPC x86
| emulator)
| xbar wrote:
| Read it again.
| Narishma wrote:
| You misread the comment. They don't want to run DOS games,
| they want to relive the inability to run them when switching
| to Windows NT.
| rezmason wrote:
| I wonder what software _is_ available NT4 on a Power
| Macintosh.
| gcp123 wrote:
| Wow, just when I was looking for a reason to fire up my old 1998
| bondi blue iMac G3, this pops up. What a weird, wild, and
| specific project!
| ndiddy wrote:
| The same developer ported PPC NT 4 to the Wii last year:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BpUpr1h9U
| ngneer wrote:
| Any screenshot?
| unleaded wrote:
| https://social.nano.lgbt/notes/9vl4xznolng53nce
| farmerbb wrote:
| https://twitter.com/virtuallyfun/status/1811812177805767078/...
| lawnchair wrote:
| Windows NT was fascinating. If you want to read a great book
| about it, check out Showstopper.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| That was a great book, up there with Masters of Doom and The
| Soul of a New Machine.
| dboreham wrote:
| _Was_ ?
| badgersnake wrote:
| Dunno why this is getting downvoted. Modern Windows is still
| very much a Windows NT derivitive.
| redox99 wrote:
| Is it a derivative? I'd say it's the latest version of
| Windows NT.
| badgersnake wrote:
| It's the same codebase that was my point. Whether it's
| still called Windows NT or whether that name died in the
| 90s can probably be argued either way.
| lizknope wrote:
| I think XP is when the DOS based Win95/98/ME was merged
| with NT
| mewse-hn wrote:
| The Win95 line wasn't really merged, more discontinued.
| XP had improved DOS/legacy compatibility vs win2000 but
| not much.
| nullindividual wrote:
| The marketing and front-facing name clearly died. The
| internal name did not.
| sedatk wrote:
| NT is still the name of the kernel. (ntoskrnl.exe)
| mycall wrote:
| I wonder if that is still true for Azure OS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Kind of,
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-
| platform-b...
|
| However plenty of Azure infrastructure uses Linux as
| well,
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux
|
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/sonic-the-
| networking-...
| pndy wrote:
| That's still the same NT line tho they changed how
| versions are called after Windows 8.1 which was NT 6.3.
| Initial Windows 10 release was bumped to NT 10.0 but
| further versions use _year-month_ and _year-half year_
| formats
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Win
| dows_vers...
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Often people conjugate based on their perspective. As in, it
| was a great book at the they read it.
| stahi wrote:
| Nostalgia reminds me of this: https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-
| openstep-and-the-triumphant-...
|
| Amelio and the rest of his senior staff began searching for a way
| out. They needed a new operating system to buoy their attempts to
| compete with the Wintel juggernaut. The same search had taken
| place several times before, but now the company was desperate.
|
| Limited Options Ultimately the list of possible targets was
| narrowed down to five options:
|
| License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface
| onto it. License Solaris from Sun and bolt a Mac-like interface
| onto it. Narrow the focus of the flagging Copland project and
| release it in a year and a half. Acquire Be and use BeOS. Acquire
| NeXT and use OpenStep.
| mepian wrote:
| They did end up releasing salvageable bits and pieces of
| Copland as Mac OS 8.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Similar story to Cairo with Microsoft [0].
|
| Both visionary, both only partial successes.
|
| WinFS :-(
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think of it as a time when people became so entranced
| with the idea of the emerging object-oriented zeitgeist
| that they imagined that making things OO and component
| driven would just hand-wave towards success. People rushed
| to make infrastructure to support this model, and, well, it
| was no magic bullet. Complexity, fragility, and a lot of
| hard work remained.
| exe34 wrote:
| the thing I'd like to see is for software to expose
| functional/"rest"-like interfaces. similar with websites
| and the content/user data.
|
| if you look at what accessibility software achieves by
| simply looking at the screen/hooking into the OS, now
| imagine any and all software could be connected like
| that.
|
| some of this functionality is now provided in individual
| silos, e.g. an email with an appointment in gmail can go
| into your Google calendar. a ticket from your train
| company can be added to Google wallet.
|
| but if you look at a flight booking system and want to
| compare the total price of a given set of dates for
| travel, including hotel and other things at different
| times - you're back to doing it on paper (or use
| somebody's website where 20% of the flights or hotels you
| want aren't included).
| nullindividual wrote:
| > the thing I'd like to see is for software to expose
| functional/"rest"-like interfaces. similar with websites
| and the content/user data.
|
| You mean, COM?
| postmodest wrote:
| Isn't that the SmallTalk model, but everyone decided to
| use C++ instead?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not everyone, IBM OS/2 SOM had support for Smalltalk, C
| and C++.
|
| Smalltalk was OS/2's .NET, so to speak.
|
| Unfortunately it all died alongside OS/2, followed by
| IBM's pivot to Java.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| You would have enjoyed AREXX IPC on the Amiga.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx
| temac wrote:
| It's funny how cancelled projects are somehow making people
| almost more "nostalgic" than projects that actually
| shipped. One of the reason may be that cancelled projects
| don't need to be completed, to ship with a reasonably good
| quality, to have an easy to use interface, to be
| sustainable for a long enough period of time, etc.
| nemomarx wrote:
| There's a concept in political theory about why people
| become nostalgic for lost causes, failed movements, etc -
| kind of a backwards looking utopianism?
|
| If only we had done X, if only this group had succeeded
| instead of failed in the past... I do agree that it's a
| way to avoid looking at the actual implementations and
| details of a real thing, and just go to what might have
| been directly.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I rather see a reason that many such cancelled projects
| had very elegant architectures/structures, which is
| something that hackers love.
|
| If you want to ship a product so that it becomes
| commercially successful, you often have to "deeply taint"
| this clear vision to make the product compatible with the
| multitude of very inelegant (industry) standards that
| customers expect/require.
|
| Thus the nostalgia is not about shipping vs not shipping,
| but about keeping an elegant vision or be willing to
| taint it to be compatible with a "depraved" world.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I saw Copland at MacWorld Expo Boston at Apple's booth. It
| kernel panicked. We didn't get to use it.
|
| But wow do I remember how exciting it was the first time I
| read about it in MacUser magazine. Basically some GUI mockups
| and promises of cool under-the-hood improvements, possibly
| the first time I was excited about future computing. Thank
| goodness they bought NeXT instead. They had no ability to
| manage projects at scale at the time.
|
| Too bad TimApple has no sense of how to do anything other
| than chase growth; we need another product person at the
| helm. Oh well.
| karlgkk wrote:
| I'm tired of hearing "Tim Apple's Apple Can't Engineer".
|
| VisionOS has some of the most incredible, coolest
| engineering I've seen in a long time, from top to bottom.
| Even if you're not interested in AR/VR, the writeups and
| sessions about the dual processor OS layout they've used,
| the scene and room graphing technology they've built, and
| the challenges of building ultra low latency pass through
| scene reconstruction and mapping are incredible.
|
| Vision Pro might honestly be one of the technically coolest
| things built in the last 10 years, and I really hope they
| get the price down and fix some of the UX (weight, battery,
| etc), because it is something I use every day (and in fact,
| am writing this post on right now). It's for sure a
| Beta/DevKit/etc, and I wouldn't recommend the casual person
| to buy one, but again, on engineering chops alone, it is a
| masterpiece.
| jmb99 wrote:
| > and I really hope they get the price down
|
| Very much agreed. I get why it's expensive and I'm no
| stranger to the apple tax (and usually don't mind it all
| that much), but I got the email today that it's now
| available in Canada and $5k for a headset is... steep.
| nrr wrote:
| "Too bad TimApple has no sense of how to do anything other
| than chase growth ..." I feel like this is more emblematic
| of the wider industry trend than Apple's own strategy that
| they chose to impose on us.
|
| The focus shifted very hard over the past 15-20 years from
| selling people new and novel gadgets and software to
| turning us ordinary folks into "monthly active users."
| Personal computing got a lot less personal, and Apple
| leaned into it to stay relevant.
| faefox wrote:
| What I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought
| Be instead of NeXT.
| scelerat wrote:
| I can't think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You mean when NeXT bought Apple and forced Apple to finance
| the deal.
|
| A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.
| alwillis wrote:
| Apple looked at it as an acquisition, while NeXT looked
| at it as a merger.
|
| NeXT didn't buy Apple obviously, but Steve Jobs and his
| lieutenants took over the most important positions within
| Apple.
|
| Which made sense given the situation Apple found itself
| in.
| faefox wrote:
| For sure, it was pretty clearly the right call at the time
| and objectively so with the benefit of hindsight. But BeOS
| was just too good to be allowed (forced, really) to die on
| the vine the way that it did.
| tiledjinn wrote:
| No need for hindsight. BeOS is still alive. A Haiku for
| you.
| nine_k wrote:
| Some other company would release the iPhone then!
| Damogran6 wrote:
| While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was
| a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some
| stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to
| have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and
| wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.
| pavlov wrote:
| Why was multiuser so important? Apple's most successful
| operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn't multiuser
| either.
|
| BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and
| tablets. But of course it's an open question whether Apple
| could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of
| Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or
| merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.
| xattt wrote:
| Multi-user would have likely been bolted on one way or
| another at some point, as had happened when other OSes
| gained fundamental new features.
| kbolino wrote:
| Was any operating system actually able to go from single-
| user to multi-user so easily? Windows NT and OS X were
| totally rewritten from the ground up relative to their
| single-user predecessors Windows 9x and classic Mac OS.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I agree that iOS isn't multi-user in any real, like,
| multiple user accounts intended to be used by real people
| sense.
|
| I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right?
| Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over
| multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?
| PlutoIsAPlanet wrote:
| Yes, iOS still uses users in the technical "Unix" sense,
| they're just not mapped to actual physical users, but
| instead to various services.
|
| Android is in a similar boat. They're still an important
| way to manage filesystem access of programs.
| meibo wrote:
| Android isn't in a similar boat, AOSP has full isolated
| Multi-User support that is realized through Unix users.
| You can create new users through Settings and they have
| their own home screen, apps and files.
|
| Most vendors have this enabled now and things like work
| accounts/MDM use the same system.
|
| https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user
| anyfoo wrote:
| iOS barely uses that. Processes commonly run as "mobile"
| or "root", but it does not matter very much. POSIX users
| and access permissions are archaic, and, in my opinion,
| don't match with how almost any device is being used
| nowadays. iOS implements its own concepts through
| entitlements, containers, vaults, sandboxes etc. (Look up
| the "Apple Platform Security Guide" for details.)
| Damogran6 wrote:
| It allows applications to run in different priviledge
| contexts and allows you inherit privilidges on a network,
| off the top of my head.
|
| Unless you _want_ your solitare game have the ability to
| enumerate your contacts and send mail.
| pavlov wrote:
| macOS and iOS use a completely different mechanism to
| ensure a game doesn't read my contacts or make network
| requests. It has nothing to do with Unix-style users.
|
| They could have built that on top of BeOS just as well as
| on NextStep.
| anthk wrote:
| Unix permissions will allow you do to that perfectly
| fine.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > Why was multiuser so important?
|
| Because computing devices, and access to them, was not so
| ubiquitous back then. Families all had to share a single
| computer. Business users had to share access to large
| servers. There were no smartphones. Some had to travel to
| an educational setting just to see or use a computer.
| pzautke wrote:
| As someone who loved BeOS at the time, past discussion here
| on HN leads to believe that Apple's adoption of it would have
| had some real challenges.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062
| postmodest wrote:
| I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned
| into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the
| Android phone and it's all over for everyone including
| Microsoft.
| nailer wrote:
| HTC G1 the original Android phone, was basically another
| sidekick. We'd have this shitty Android and WinMo for a
| decade longer and eventually things would get good.
| monocasa wrote:
| The slate form factor was already being explored by other
| manufacturers before the iPhone came out.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
| selectodude wrote:
| Sure, but unlike the iPhone, that thing was an
| unbelievable piece of shit.
| pathartl wrote:
| It's not hard to extrapolate that something would have
| entered the market. I assume it would only have been a
| couple of years later.
| hylaride wrote:
| I suspect if Apple and NeXT never "merged", the phone
| market would be RIM vs (a very different) Android, but we'd
| be worse off.
|
| Blackberries were OK at the time, but my god RIM was so
| culturally conservative and Google at the time had no
| design sense that we'd probably be 10 years behind where we
| are now - and if we even had software keyboards they'd be
| terrible.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Outside US, it would keep being all about J2ME, Symbian,
| Windows CE/Pocket PC, Bada OS.
|
| Which keep being forgotten, in these kind of discussions.
| aswanson wrote:
| Hard to argue with that. Still remember a co-intern telling
| me "Steve Jobs returned to Apple!" and just shrugging.
| pndy wrote:
| Right innit? It's not just Apple using BeOS but wondering how
| everything else would be different. You actually need to...
| _think different_ at this point, aye?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Assuming Apple would still be successful, and not close shop.
|
| It would have settled C++ as the main systems language on
| desktop OSes, between Windows, and Mac Be OS.
|
| Objective-C would have died, and Swift would never come to
| be.
|
| Clang and LLVM probably would never had gotten Apple's
| sponsorship.
|
| POSIX would have died on the desktop, as Be OS like other non
| UNIX OSes wasn't that keen in being UNIX like.
|
| There wouldn't be a flock of Linux and BSD developers rushing
| out to buy Apple hardware, instead of sponsoring OEMs
| shipping PCs with those distributons.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| Apple would have died.
|
| I love BeOS.
|
| I love BeOS more than you.
|
| I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassee.
|
| BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver
| on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that
| machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII
| running BeOS.
|
| BeOS wasn't ready.
|
| Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be
| struck and struck fast (1997). I started using BeOS in 1997
| with one of the first Power Macintosh releases.
|
| Those days (my days) it wasn't ready-- you had to pile patch
| on top of patch on top of community fix on top of some set of
| drivers some dude in Boise made in order to get things
| functional. I spent more time browsing BeOS listservs and
| download sites fixing things (at 56k) than using it.
|
| Everyone is remembering fondly the R4.5/R5 days in late 1999.
| Three years after the December 1996 announcement of the NeXT
| acquisition. By then BeOS was... better. It was running on
| PCs and had a much larger user community. In 1996/7? Just a
| handful of BeBox owners and Mac users dumb enough (me) to try
| it.
|
| Management would have been professionally negligent to choose
| it over NeXTStep.
|
| In 1996, when Apple was up against the wall, NeXTStep was
| almost ten years old. All they had to do was buy the company,
| port it to PPC, and change some copyright messages and icons
| around. Took about two years.
|
| BeOS would have required way more time, money, and expertise.
|
| BeOS had no multi-user, no security (at all), an
| "aspirational" level of posix compliance, drivers that were a
| disaster, a network stack specifically designed to frustrate
| you, and no "companies that actually matter and no Gobe
| doesn't count" application support.
|
| I get it. It was pretty. It was fast. French electro DJs
| loved it because it was low latency, and some audio tools
| were ported to it.
|
| A userbase of French electro DJs doesn't pay the bills.
| temac wrote:
| The C++ API bound forever to the gcc 2.95 ABI IIRC was also
| an "interesting" choice. Sure with success they would
| certainly have engineered a way forward, out of necessity,
| but if I would have had to give my opinion about that for
| Apple at the time...
| timschmidt wrote:
| The Haiku project folks worked out ABI compatibility for
| newer GCC releases. Current builds of Haiku support
| binary backwards compatibility with the 2.95 ABI while
| also supporting newer GCC ABIs at the same time. So at
| least we know it is (and would have been) possible.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Next's APIs were also ported to run on top of Windows NT and
| Sun's Solaris.
|
| In addition, the entire NextStep OS ran bare metal on several
| CPU architectures.
|
| > originally ran only on NeXT's Motorola 68k-based workstations
| and that was then ported to run on 32-bit Intel x86-based "IBM-
| compatible" personal computers, PA-RISC-based workstations from
| Hewlett-Packard, and SPARC-based workstations from Sun
| Microsystems.
|
| https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep, I used to run Apple's (maybe it was still NeXT at the
| time?) Mail app on Windows NT, I can't recall where I got it,
| maybe it was part of some goodies included with WebObjects?
| dkadams wrote:
| Yes. WebObjects development was possible on NT due to
| "YellowBox". It shipped with ProjectBuilder, EOModler,
| Mail, and other NeXT apps.
|
| You could even do Objective-C monkeypatching shennigans on
| YellowBox, which I remember being needed at the time to get
| the scroll wheels on certain mice to work on YellowBox
| apps.
|
| http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F
| 7...
| pjmlp wrote:
| It were those ports to Sun's Solaris, that influenced Java's
| design and later on Java EE as well.
| smm11 wrote:
| I still think Solaris/Mac stood a chance; the hardware would
| have been miles better than anything else.
| vt240 wrote:
| The best 68k Mac I ever had was MAE in Solaris 9 on my
| SunBlade 2500. Fully patched up Solaris 9 had all the
| filesystem and disk i/o improvements, and none of the libc
| changes that happened in 10 which broke all backwards
| compatibility.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Why was A/UX not in the running, it was already written? Just
| add some polish.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
| rjsw wrote:
| A/UX runs on 68k NuBus machines, not PowerPC PCI ones.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Unix itself does--seems like a short porting effort
| compared to the other choices. They had emulation available
| as well.
| lizknope wrote:
| A/UX was still a licensed version of Unix. This post says the
| licensing fee was $1,000 per seat.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was.
| ..
|
| I remember the AT&T / BSD lawsuit in 1992. Maybe Apple looked
| at NeXTSTEP and since it is based on the Mach microkernel and
| BSD that they would be able to fix the 10 or so files to
| avoid the AT&T / Unix System Labs licensing fees like
| Free/NetBSD did.
|
| In the 1980's Microsoft had their own port of Unix named
| Xenix. Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited
| MS-DOS?
|
| https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix
|
| > In March of 1982, Western Electric reduced the royalty fees
| that it charged for UNIX with the introduction of UNIX System
| III (a combination of UNIX V7 and PWD). This was done by
| raising the source license cost, but lowering the royalty per
| user license to $100 (about $318 in 2023) from $250. This
| meant that Microsoft's prepayment of $200000 in 1980 (around
| $700k in 2023) for a discount in volume was voided if they
| wished to use the newer system. That same month, on the 10th,
| Paul Allen held a seminar in NYC where he outlined plans for
| MS-DOS 2.0.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited MS-
| DOS?
|
| Hardware requirements.
|
| For a (quite long) while the plan was to keep DOS for
| microcomputers and Xenix for the serious stuff. DOS gained
| some extensions that made it very Xenix/UNIX-like (like
| subdirectories, pipes, "-" as command line switch char,
| device files in "\dev" instead of a global namespace,
| etc.).
| progmetaldev wrote:
| I think for the time period, hobbyists can't be written
| off either. My dad got into Commodore and Atari in the
| late 70's/early 80's, and sparked my interest in
| software. Computing already wasn't cheap, but if the home
| consumer needed to pay for extra licensing fees, I could
| easily see adoption being far more limited to business. I
| think a lot of developers, myself included, got their
| start as hobbyists and never would have caught the "itch"
| to develop if for not this early exposure at home.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like
| interface onto it.
|
| Gosh, am I glad that that didn't happen. I wonder how serious
| of an option that really was, it seems wildly out of place
| compared to the other propositions, which are all reasonable.
| andrewf wrote:
| Apple bolted Carbon APIs onto NeXTSTEP/Mach, and Microsoft
| bolted the OS/2 Presentation Manager onto NT
| (https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/19/presentation-manager-
| for...), so I'm not sure why bolting Carbon onto NT would be
| unreasonable.
| cnasc wrote:
| IIRC from reading Showstopper, NT was intended to afford
| that sort of different frontend swapping. It just happened
| that Windows became the primary focus in the end.
| stg24 wrote:
| It might have been necessary to stick with the NT 3.51
| codebase. I think they broke the clean separation of the
| GUI from the rest of the OS in 4.0, which was launched
| that year, for performance reasons.
| the_panopticon wrote:
| Fascinating work. The ARC std
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(specification) was used to
| boot the Dec Alpha Windows machines, along w/ MIPS, etc. Anyone
| know of other open source variants of that in the wild? At intel
| in 1998 the original efi spec was modeled on & inspired by Arc.
| The Intel boot initiative (IBI) in fact looked mostly like Arc.
| EFI (now UEFI) is sort of Arc + installable GUID-based interfaces
| (aka protocols) a la MS COM
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model. Page 8 of
| https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
| recounts some of those travails.
| lizknope wrote:
| My roommate's Alpha had the SRM firmware which he used to boot
| NetBSD. ARC would boot NT but SRM could not.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRM_firmware
| runjake wrote:
| It's been mentioned here before, but Dave Plummer's YouTube
| interview[1] with Dave Cutler[2] (NT lead architect) is a must-
| watch with never revealed before history about Windows NT.
|
| 1.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3c...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
| Connector2542 wrote:
| how far away is it from being a (even as a joke) daily driver?
| Palomides wrote:
| considering how there's basically zero software for PPC Windows
| even if it were running smoothly, very far
| roytam87 wrote:
| but at least there is VC4 RISC Edition available for PowerPC,
| you can compile something on it.
| walterburns wrote:
| If I had a dime for every person that's asked for this.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You'd have a dime?
| xattt wrote:
| This is one of those things that I'd have nerdy arguments about
| with my nerdy friends in middle school.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Dude, shut up, the Amiga is totally better. Cooperative
| multitasking is lame. Have you seen HAM mode??
| xattt wrote:
| No, Amiga sucks, it can't even run UNIX! Do you even know
| what it is? My dad uses it for work.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on what one considers UNIX.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| The Amiga 3000 and 2000 can run Amix, a port of Unix System
| V Release 4.
|
| https://www.amigaunix.com/doku.php/home
| Locutus_ wrote:
| Hah! We had ixemul.library and the geekgadgets distro back
| in the day! Full bizare GNU+BSD userland on top of AmigaOS!
| pwenzel wrote:
| Man, I loved Windows NT back in the day. It was light enough that
| I could run it on fairly low end late-90s hardware, and it was
| substantially more stable than Windows 95.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Had Microsoft been serious with POSIX subsystem, and most
| likely I would never bothered with Linux for our UNIX
| assignments.
|
| Instead I dual booted between both of them.
| hylaride wrote:
| It's a shame. NT did support POSIX, but it was in practice
| designed to make it easier to port UNIX apps. At co-op job I
| had back in the day (~2000), I had to fight with Veritas'
| backup software on NT that wrote to tapes. I don't recall
| what it was (a device mapping to the drive maybe?), but you
| could see the UNIX foundations of the software.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Ironically they had multiple iterations of it, with POSIX
| subsystem in NT, MKS Toolkit, Interix, Windows Services for
| UNIX, for various levels of _" POSIX support"_, dropped
| everything on Windows Vista, only to create WSL out from
| Project Astoria ashes.
|
| And before they got golden goose with MS-DOS/IBM deal, they
| were into the UNIX business with Xenix.
|
| A few reasons why Linux would probably never taken off, had
| Microsoft stayed closer to their UNIX related projects.
| temac wrote:
| There was actually "SUA" after "SFU", only removed in
| Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > Had Microsoft been serious with POSIX subsystem, and most
| likely I would never bothered with Linux for our UNIX
| assignments.
|
| Arguably they did have a serious POSIX subsystem w/ the
| Interix (nee OpenNT) acquisition but they didn't do anything
| with it. I remember building GNU software under Interix and
| having a blast with it.
|
| I still wish there was a distribution of NT that booted text
| -mode and had an Interix-based userland. That would be tons
| of fun.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nowadays that would be Windows Server Core with WSL, which
| unfortunely isn't yet supported.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Interix was so much more orthogonal to the design of NT--
| so much more elegant. WSLv1 was more elegant than WSLv2.
| WSLv2 feels like a minor step up from just running a
| Linux VM.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Agreed, that is what happens when Linux syscalls are more
| relevant than regular UNIX.
|
| See the usual complains about macOS not being Linux, from
| people that probably should be supporting Linux OEMs
| instead of buying Apple laptops.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| Absolutely, I had a university instructor that taught us both
| Windows NT and (I believe) Red Hat Linux in 1998, for running
| web servers. Linux made much more sense when thinking about a
| multi-user system running various services. I ended up dual
| booting Windows and Slackware to learn Linux, while also
| being able to use the software I was already familiar with on
| Windows. If Microsoft had gone deeply into POSIX for their
| consumer systems, I don't believe I would have switched over
| to Linux except for quality of life improvements that may
| have come about (which may have never happened).
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Can someone explain the context here? Surely NT is closed source
| and was never developed for macs, what actually is this? And what
| are the chances you can get software for it? Presumably most NT
| software was compiled for Intel only and closed source.
| nullindividual wrote:
| NT4 was developed for PowerPC architectures (and MIPS, Alpha).
| A large portion of the NT4 source code was leaked [0]. I'm not
| saying the author used the NT4 source code in any fashion, but
| I would imagine using such source would make life much easier
| to accomplish this task.
|
| Or the author clean room reversed engineered the bootloader. Or
| there is enough information out there to forgo the need for any
| internal knowledge of Windows code.
|
| The PPC code base was never explicitly targeted for Macs, but
| other systems from IBM/Motorola; but because it is a 'common'
| platform, the binaries themselves on the NT4 ISO do not need
| modification.
|
| And yes, you can find the source code on GitHub. In multiple
| repos!
|
| [0] https://www.neowin.net/news/exclusive-windows-2000--
| windows-...
| temac wrote:
| Nt has a dynamic HAL layer to adapt it to platforms. I'm not
| sure if it was publicly documented, but in any case yes the
| source code leak don't harm that kind of port, even if you
| "just" have to write a HAL.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The current PE exe format supports it. As well as a few
| Alpha, a few ARM formats, a few MIPS format, Itanium and of
| course x86. The big part would be finding a compiler that
| spits out the right code. The preceding NE format also did
| a few variations.
| aeyes wrote:
| Isn't this just drivers and a HAL? Microsoft built the OS in
| a way so that such ports would be possible so there should be
| some API documentation out there. The question is how
| complete it is because everybody just used the MS provided
| HAL.
| hylaride wrote:
| Yeah, I think the only commercial OEM releases of NT that got
| sold were x86 and Alpha, though there was support for a
| handful of specific MIPS and PPC machines, I don't think
| there were any OEM sales of them with it. I do know that only
| x86 and Alpha had all the service packs released. There were
| also at one time internal MS builds on Sparc, but that didn't
| last long. Alpha did have some pre-release builds of windows
| 2000 that went out, but there was no final release.
|
| A fun fact is that because of where he worked at the time was
| a DEC shop, the creator of PuTTY originally created it
| because he got an alpha windows machine and there was no
| compatible terminal emulator for alpha NT. He supported alpha
| builds well into the 2000s and IIRC only dropped it as the
| machine he was using still for builds finally died.
| fredoralive wrote:
| NT was designed to be portable, so the machine specific parts
| are cleanly separated, even on the same CPU. So if you port
| only those parts, the existing binaries for an architecture
| should work. The three bits are:
|
| 1) ARC boot firmware. NT was developed on non-x86 systems like
| i860 then MIPS, and ARC is the native boot firmware used (on
| x86 NTLDR emulated it prior to Vista). Similar to a PC BIOS /
| UEFI, and a PCI PowerMac would use OpenFirmware. As well as
| providing an ARC compatible environment that loads over
| OpenFirmware, this project seems to does some fun so the boot
| firmware can pretend there's a storage device so that driver
| "floppies" can be loaded during the initial stages of setup.
| (ie an F6 disc)
|
| 2) A HAL. The main NTOSKRNL is hardware agnostic, so the idea
| is that there's one binary for each CPU architecture. But the
| kernel needs to interface with actual timers, busses etc., so
| the interface code is in HAL.DLL and the appropriate one is
| copied by setup. (For example see
| https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/hal/history...
| for a list of x86-32 ones in older versions of windows, with
| various HALs for NEC PC-98, IBM MCA, various early
| multiprocessing systems, nowadays there's just one AMD64 one
| that's mostly in the kernel itself). So the main kernel in
| unaltered, and halgoss handles the Mac specific stuff.
|
| 3) Device drivers. Once NT is up and running it does need
| actual drivers.
|
| The specs for 1) are known, so can presumably be emulated, and
| I guess there's a DDK for 3) (or it can be deduced from another
| DDK), I guess 2) is probably the one that would need the most
| insider knowledge, I'm not sure if the leaked NT sources go
| down to that level as I've never looked at them.
|
| As for compatibility, 32 bit PowerPC Win32 binaries, 16 bit x86
| Win16 binaries, and whatever x86 DOS stuff will run in an NT4
| DOS box. No x86 Win32, only Alpha had an emulator for Win32 x86
| stuff (until ARM stuff).
| mycall wrote:
| I remember migrating whole Windows installations using image
| copies, but taking a fresh install's HAL files and copying
| them onto the images and volla, system transfer completed
| (device drivers would need reinstalling though).
| amelgares wrote:
| The Xbox 360 was PowerPC running a variant of the Windows 2000
| (NT) OS.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specificati...
| tiahura wrote:
| Microsoft killed the PowerPC 615 IBM engineer offers up 615
| information
| https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/01/microsoft_killed_the_...
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Writing a new NT HAL is a very impressive achievement. A tip of
| my hat to you, sir!
|
| Docs are spotty at best, and I am sure many bugs aren't known as
| existing HALs simply got lucky to not expose them.
| Lammy wrote:
| Neat. I am totally going to try this on one of my spare
| Blue&White G3s.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Finally, I can run a domain controller off an old G3.
| nxobject wrote:
| THat's absurd. That's it, that's the comment. Hack of the Year
| award, stat!
| unixhero wrote:
| I love the boot loader file
| https://github.com/Wack0/maciNTosh/blob/main/boot_files/Syst...
|
| Sidenote: The Open Firmware syntax is so unreadable. No wonder it
| was scorned. A lost opportunity.
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